On 20 May 2026, Wikimedia announced that the Community Tech responsible for the meta:Community Wishlist will be disbanded, resulting in 6-employees being laid off including several high-profile union-members of meta:Wiki Workers United including Brooke Vibber, the first employee and CTO of WMF with deep knowledge of MediaWiki software. All 6 employees were encouraged to apply to open roles, but there was no guaranteed positions for the team. The community was furious. On English Wikipedia, a whopping 1,000 comments between community editors and foundation leadership were exchanged. For a journalistic summary, read the Verge magazine piece. This essay, is a highly opinionated piece about the future of Wiki Workers United and why we should get involved.

George Bernard Shaw once said that "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve". Essentially the qualitative character of the Wikimedia movement is a delicate balance between volunteer editors, paid staff and Foundation leadership, among other stakeholders (contributors, readers, Affiliates etc..).

The WMF operated without workplace representation for over 20 years, so what does the early stage union drive at Wikimedia mean for the Wikimedia movement's already complex ecosystem?

Workplace democracy, specifically unionization at Wikimedia Foundation is inevitable. However, depending on the degree of community support (see more below), future retaliatory measures from management and internal-organization of Wikimedia staff, the direction and shape of the nascent meta:Wiki Workers United will either be adversarial or harmonious addition to the Wiki ecosystem. As of writing, the solidarity strike petition is the 2nd most popular petition on English Wikipedia which simply asks management to do the right thing and go beyond the bare legal minimum.

Management so far indicated a willingness to listen and even indicated a positive reception to unionization, but it does not mean much if management is unable to back words with action and correct its mistakes. So far it has re-hired 2 of the 6 fired employees, with a pending offer for a third employee. There is still time to do the right thing and turn this into a learning moment, instead of a protracted battle for union recognition and community participation.

In a nutshell, the Wiki Workers United campaign focuses on two major themes:

1. Working conditions -- internally focused on Wikimedia staff, e.g regarding hiring, firing, and salary equity.
2. Empowering the broader Wikimedia movement by giving a voice regarding transparency, and product development.

The abrupt dismantling of the Community Tech team without replacement, cut off one of the direct contact points between the community and the Foundation engineering teams. Given the high churn rate of senior-leadership, I am skeptical that the Foundation can make strategic decisions, without input of either the community or staff. The fact that CEO BMeehan-WMF and CTO SDeckelmann-WMF were unprepared for the community backlash, shows a disconnect from the community, something the Community Tech team ironically could have mitigated and bridged. If we assume good faith, that this was not union busting, then it exposes something even more worrisome. The root symptom and argument for a union, is a stifling workplace and a climate of fear where individual staff members need to make a risk assessment, and decide whether they can or should express themselves publicly and or internally within the workplace. The solidarity campaign for Wiki Workers United is happening without direct coordination of Wikimedia staff, in order to ensure their safety.

This is likely a familiar situation for anyone who depends on their job for their livelihood. High profile union-drives are often blamed for fueling conflict, when in reality they reveal existing frictions and fault-lines between management and workers.

Formally, workers of Wikimedia Foundation need to decide whether they want to sign union-cards and seek either voluntary union recognition or an NLRB certified vote. More interestingly, Wiki Workers United will need to figure out its leadership structures, internal decision processes, demands and public communications. Trade unions worth their salt are inherently democratic, but they are only as good as the level of engagement of their members. If anyone believes the Wikimedia Foundation staff are rotten to the core, then of course any associated union structure will also be rotten. I am much more optimistic and assume good faith, that the vast majority of Wikimedia staff have the interest of the Wikimedia projects at heart and want the same things that the community movement and Foundation leadership want. Both the community and staff want to see Wikimedia thrive and overcome challenges together with the Foundation.

A trade union for Wikimedia staff would not solve all issues such as rising authoritarianism, enshittification or income inequality, but it would enrich debates and enable lower-level staff to participate in conversations without fear of retaliation. This will be necessary for the difficult conversations that don't have easy answers, for example experimental proposals in the Wikimedia Foundation planning.

With full time employee compensations representing a large expenditure in the annual budgets, it is tempting for disillusioned community members or management to view employees as line-items and perhaps even the root of Wikimedia's problems, without dismissing the qualitative institutional knowledge and community relations they provide.

A trade-union can save the Foundation money, by ensuring stable employee retention, reducing the cost of onboarding, context-switching or golden-parachutes that executive leadership receives when they depart. In the difficult situations where terminations may be necessitated for financial reasons or individual misconduct, collective agreements can ensure just-cause is adhered to, bringing confidence both to the wider workforce and wiki community that terminations happen in a dignified manner, where all other options are exhausted, instead of turning every layoff into a high-profile public relations disaster that risks harming the reputation of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Despite renewed interest and popularity in the United States, union density or the ratio of union/non-union members is on the decline. The rate of newly unionized workplaces is not making up for the growing labor market, or retiring union members. This means that most workers learn about trade-unions in the abstract, e.g from media coverage, e.g Hollywood celebrities going on strike or transport strikes.

Unionization in the tech industry is on the rise after decades of inertia. Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi), the founder of The Wikipedia Library warns in his op-ed that Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia. In my personal editing capacity, I have noted some of the tech labor struggles at Samsung, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Amazon among others.

Future Wikipedia articles could be created about the large non-profits that are unionizing, from Planned Parenthood, Amnesty, ACLU, EFF, South Poverty Law Center and the many other affiliates of Nonprofit Professional Employees Union. A wave of unionization at digital and traditional newsrooms too reflect the collective responses to automation and depreciating online views.

It is not the first time volunteer editors have taken collective action either. Wikipedia editors might fondly remember in 2012 when multiple Wiki projects blacked out their respective home pages, or Wikipedia:FRAMGATE which was one of the lightning moments in rebuilding the deteriorating trust between the community and WMF. In other volunteer-driven moderator platforms, Reddit mods went on strike in 2023 as did AOL chatroom monitors in 1999. Some of these collective actions were more successful than others. There are instances where content creators at Spotify and Youtube organised themselves, in parallel with Spotify and Youtube employees organising, but I cannot recall an instance where volunteer and paid contributors have combined forces, which might happen for the first time with volunteer editors threatening solidarity strikes in coordination with Wiki Workers United.

Wikimedia Foundation neither fits the classic "big tech", media nor non-profit profile, but either way, unionization is a logical response to the symptoms of growing uncertainty around algorithmic enshittification, disconnects between public values and internal actions and general uncertainty. Sounds familiar?

Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch. Do not underestimate the long-term obstacles ahead of us, but also embrace the fact that we have a lot of collective power. It is important to both celebrate the symbolic power and the withdrawal of activity by editors with advanced permissions (see the statistics)

1. Sign the English Wikipedia solidarity strike petition at Wikipedia:Wiki Workers United solidarity
2. Sign the official statement of solidarity with meta:Wiki Workers United
3. Update your signature and link to the Wikipedia:Wiki Workers Uniteds
4. Display your union bug/userbox with pride

Markup	Renders as
{{User Wiki Workers United}}	This user supports the Wiki Workers United union of WMF staff. Sign the petition!

1. Wikimedia Deutschland has a works council and nonprofit-membership structure (see below)
2. Art+Feminism Workers United! -- an ongoing union effort after mass dismissal

Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) is an autonomous non-profit that heavily contributes to MediaWiki, including the creation of Wikidata and its own version of Technical Wishes. Every few years, WMDE employees vote in 7-of their coworkers to represent them in the Works Council, a German legally binding structure that approves the hiring/firing and transfer of employees. The Works Council's default regulatory powers are so powerful, it can even block the rollout of internal software not explicitly approved in a works agreement. If anything, because of employee input, WMDE and many other tech companies in Germany are in a better decision to make long-term technical decisions, because they are not afraid of being retaliated against, for merely questioning senior leadership.

User:Shushugah is an experienced Central Works Council chair in an automotive tech company in Berlin, Germany. He spends his volunteer time editing Wikipedia and supporting unionization in transnational workplaces. He contributed to Signpost article on WikiProject Organised Labour and digital unionism on Wikipedia.

• How to Start a Union at Your Workplace
• The Passion Subsidy - challenges of unionizing in a workplace you are passionate about
• Cohen, Nicole; de Peuter, Greig (2020-03-11). "New Media Unions : Organizing Digital Journalists". Taylor & Francis. Archived from the original on 2024-12-28.